To celebrate Patricia Farrell’s sixtieth birthday, Robert Sheppard is posting a series of poems and other things on his blog every day for the next few weeks. Poems so far from Adrian Clarke, Gilbert Adair and Andrew Taylor, with much more to follow, here.

In an attempt to redress and rethink boundaries between the historical UK avant-gardes and work produced by Black, Asian and ethnic minority poets, the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry is seeking essays on race specifically in UK and Irish poetry. The aim of this special issue, edited by Sandeep Parmar, is to reconsider how poets of colour working across ‘avant-garde’, ‘performance’ and ‘mainstream’ traditions broaden the definition of innovation and the ‘possibilities of language’ in contemporary poetry and practice. More details, including the submission deadline, here.